Happy CAM -pers!




There are few things I love more than summer camp! Since getting my Peace Corps invite it has been a dream to bring the fun and memories of camp to Cameroonian youth, who have little to do during the holidays - there is almost no youth programming, and most kids end up vending food to help their parents or going to the village of an uncle or auntie to hang around there.

After several months of trying to plan logistics with our American mindset (that is, a mindset that believes logistics should be, well, planned) we had to embrace the fact that planning ahead is not the style here, and seriously go with the flow. We literally arrived the day of camp opening without one child having registered - we were told if people are going to come, they will just show up - within the first few days. But with the help of my awesome volunteer neighbor Ashley, two great Cameroonian friends we invited to be male co-counselors, a local orphanage/social center, and a lot of lucky stars, we had a magically successful week of health and life-skills education, games, singing, and making new friends. It was an overnight camp, so around-the-clock fun and craziness to manage, and in a remote village with no running water and unreliable electricity to boot! One of the most memorable and enjoyable weeks of Peace Corps so far.

Our girls were precious! The campers elected to call me by my middle name Alicia, since Tess does not not roll off the tongue well here, and Auntie in French is Tata, so all week I was "Tata Alicia". Each evening the girls would bring Ashley and me buckets of water to wash our faces and flush our toilet, and they had to sweep and mop the floor each day before morning meditation. The Center staff said chores are a crucial piece of any education program, and where there is so much manual labor to do and few tools or ammenities, young people always get brought in as working hands.



We played the Alien Game - pretending aliens have arrived who have no idea about male and female differences, so the girls have to explain what boys are, and vice versa. Each group had to present their list, which naturally included both physical and cultural differences, and responses from the other side got heated! We then talked about "sex" vs. "gender" and how a lot of traits of males and females have been decided by society and can morph over time - women "wear skirts" but can also wear pants, men may drive moto taxis, but women also can, technically (amazingly, the one time I did see women driving their own motorcycles was in the conservative Muslim north of the coutry - go figure).

That afternoon I put up "I agree" and "I don't agree" signs on opposite sides of the room, and read statements about condoms being available in schools, women being suitable presidents and leaders, and bride price being abolished. The campers chose their sides, and fierce debates followed! The whole thing was made more dramatic by the absolute pounding rain on the tin roof that amped up the intensity big time. I was so proud of the way several kids in particular expressed and backed up their opinions and held their own, and about some of their surprisingly and encouragingly progressive views about the changing times. We had boys on both sides of the women as leaders argument getting passionate about whether women are "strong" enough to hold major power - it was pretty inspiring to see youth exploring their own changing times.

Giant hoods, lowered head, averted eyes...looks like teenage boys will do anything to avoid facing a map of the female reproductive system! But in fact these guys were awesome, and doing reprouctive health with them was an absolute blast. The fact that it was my first time doing the lesson in French and I was shaky on some vocab and prononciation actually helped break the ice...they had to help me fill in the missing words like sperm and fertilization.

Reproductive education is one of my favorite things to do with youth here - it's linked to so many important topics like self-awareness and confidence, HIV and premature pregnancy, prostitution, better gender relations and, down the line, family planning, which has loads of potential benefits for mothers, children and families here. Most girls and women especially have no idea what's happening in their own bodies and have so many questions and nowhere to get information, so teaching them about menstruation and pregnancy is really satisfying - knowledge is power! I use simple terms, talking about the uterus as the house of the baby that has to build a nice soft bed each month, and how the body uses hormones to send messages to itself. I am trying to get this talk down in Pidgin. Child = pikin. Pregnant woman = mami wey y get big belly! 

Did I tell you about the first time I brought in a model of a woman's reproductive system to a girl's seminar at the secondary school -- we talked about all the intimate details, yet the thing that had them all giggling had nothing to do with the birds and the bees. They thought it was so funny that I used the term "belly button"! They only know "naval" and could not stop cracking up. You never know!

A friend of ours from Buea now runs a small guiding service up Mt Cameroon - be built his way up after an extremely trying start to life, and we were so excited to bring him in as an example of someone overcoming obstacles and making it in Cameroon with a positive attitude and proactive planning. He told the kids all about his struggle to find productive work and stay in school, and several kids said his testimony was their favorite part of the week! We were so glad to have the advice about making goals, saving up your money, and not letting people's doubts get you down come from a Cameroonian.

Behind him is the model we drew illustrating how we can cross the sea of dangerous risks (HIV, pregnancy,
stealing, cheating, drugs, irresponsibility) by building a bridge of positive life skills (like confidence, resisting peer pressure, communication, respect, having role models, and planning ahead) to get us from where we are now to a healthy, happy future. We came back to this many times, talking about how we were starting to build those traits this week, and how sports, team-building, public speaking, healthy competition, and learning new skills are all part of the process.

We had a lot of fun bringing American games like tag and "red rover, red rover" to the kids, and had a whole morning of team sports that was a big hit - here we are doing stretching and warm-ups before soccer and handball.

After the girls had their chance to describe what boys are stereotypically like, I gave the guys a chance to present what kind of young men they ideally want to be. They were to draw a character who represented traits they admire - they found Celtics Player Kevin Barnett on the front of someone's notebook and spend most of the time painstakingly copying him (nice work though!, but they got some good points in there about how he reached success in his career by working hard and staying healthy. I could not have asked for better guys - we all know teenage boys can be tough to engage in this type of activity, but these guys were a joy. I have a special soft spot for the taller boy Sime, who lives year-round at this center and is a bit rough around the edges but has a heart of gold. I can't wait to go back and visit him this year.

While much of the week we had no electricity, one afternoon we hooked up some computers and had children write up mock invites to our cultural night on old school Microsoft Word. It was awesome watching them learn copy and paste, how to change fonts, and how to save...a lot of them had made goals about learning computer skills, so they were excited to get to explore.

What do you do when you have an old volleyball net and want to get a game going? You head out into the jungle and machete down some massive bamboo stalks...

...then cut them into poles and string it all together!

I'll never forget what happened as we were building this court. The guy above who marched confidently into the bush to hack down branches with a machete and haul them back to the field, something I would never know how to approach, then showed me an old tattered dictionary where he remembered there was an image of a volleyball court including the dimensions for the height and distance between the poles. But he had no notion of where the picture was, and started thumbing through the book from page 1. I gently tried to help once he told me what he was looking for, suggesting that it would be beside the entry for volleyball. He agreed that that would be right, but then did not understand the alphabetical ordering of the book, nor where V was in the alphabet once I showed him how a dictionary is organized.

It was so eye-opening, yet is often the case - people who are dressing in Western styles, using cell phones, and who are totally in their element with certain activities, especially labor work, have major gaps in "book smart" education. This often happens with kids who look like they could walk into a US school and fit right in with their stylish shoes and hot jeans, but cannot name the regions of their country, don't know the meaning of the cardinal directions, cannot do basic math, have no idea what a goal is, and may not have left their village in years. In many ways pictures give the impression that things here are more developed than they are because of some visible Western influences like trendy clothes. But knowledge of worldly topics and critical thinking capacity are still broadly lacking, and traditional village beliefs and practices, such as with sorcery/witchcraft, having many children, using traditional healers, and gender equality, are still widespread, even among those that look very 21st century.

A lot of kids have never gotten to know a map, so geography education is also really fun - most of our campers did not know there were seven continents, and finding Cameroon, France, and China was like a scavenger hunt. It was a great feeling when we got them to understand why Russia and Alaska are not actually on opposite sides of the world.

...love this : )

So proud of his work!! All those names in the corner are HIS, the last being etc...! People always seems to have at least six names, including, thank goodness, one Christian/English name that I can attach to and have some home of remembering and pronouncing.

This dish was delicious! All our food was cooked over a huge pit fire (located inside the wood kitchen in the background), a fact that caused a 2-3 hour daily delay in lunch being served, since the wet firewood (we are in heavy rainy season, and even inside, humidity makes everything wet - the new bane of my existence!) took forever to heat up. We also had to be patient with trucks bringing the food crops getting stuck in the mud on the way back from the field. Luckily there was always the option of running barefoot into the cornfield next to the camp, picking some ripe ears, shucking them and roasting them over the fire as a snack - the kids just know how to do all of this stuff and lead the way (like I said, Cameroonians have all sorts of skills I don't!).
Fresh roasted corn - unbelievably delicious. It was our own local take on camp s'mores.

Doing some one-on-one work with Naomi (the last of her five names!) on making goals, something that was an extremely foreign concept to the kids and took a lot of explaining and re-explaining to get across. We ended up with three goals for her: 1) trying out for the handball team at school this fall, 2) learning how to browse the internet on her aunt's computer, and 3) saving up the money she gets to buy food at school to help buy notebooks for her five younger brothers who never have school supplies.
I was very, very proud!

Snack time! These have just been picked from up the street.

It is distracting to me how well-dressed and well-off these campers appear, and how it does not reflect their reality at all. Only a few of the kids' caretakers could pay for the camp at all - severely impacting our budget -, and many come from homes with serious financial strains, as well as many other social issues. Since appearance is so important and people take extreme pains to look good, campers brought their couple nice items, and wore the same clothes nearly all week.

They would wash them every few days, and scrub their shoes every day (clean shoes is perhaps the biggest daily life priority I see here! When I leave muddy sandals around, they inevitable get washed for me, as people are nearly offended - and often openly judgemental - of gathered dirt on footwear. The fact that hand and bathroom cleanliness doesn't seem to matter is more than a bit ironic and frustrating!) When the sun came out the girls would beg to be excused so they could go and hang their clothes out, and when the rain started, kids would scamper off to go and take their clothes off the line.

Ashley and I noticed that as a huge difference from camp in the states, where you take pride and pleasure in getting rugged and grungy (the difference being that it is generally respected that you could and do look decent at other times, whereas here, if you don't look good, you probably can't look good). Despite the much less condusive surroundings, looking clean whenever you possibly can, if you possibly can, is a way of showing status.  



Sippi was that classic priceless camper you want to smack but who just melts your heart - always causing trouble, but making up for it by bringing us together with his pranks and gift of keeping everything light and fun.



Friday night's cultural talent show had some laugh out loud hilarious comedy sketches (Renee in the striped shirt was a total ham), sweet tradiational dances - really cool to see what the kids have already learned to present from their tribes - ...and one boy from the big city doing Justin Bieber's "Baby" with only backup singers for accompanyment. Ashley and I could not even hold it together it was so cute. Music and dancing is second nature to them all - on a couple night when pounding rain was holding us all capture in the dinner building, they broke down in "Stomp" like chaos, pounding on benches, clapping and singing out - it was one of the coolest things I have ever seen kids do.

In the US, we buckle our seatbelts, make sure our headlights and brakes work, get our tires changed and keep the oil fresh to make sure we are safe on the road. When none of those are options and your roads are a collection of muddy craters...you pray! There was a formally led prayer session before Ashley and I took off, accompanied by a truckload of heavily jostled, singing kids sending us off.  

The best part - the kids got to be kids.

Don't even need flowers, just bring on those showers!

Ashley and I debuted our matching dresses (made from material sent as a gift by a suitor!) at a farewell dinner for two wonderful nurses who have been working at the hospital in Buea since September. The restaurant was a little bit of ex-pat heaven in the country's biggest city Douala, including rolls with olive oil, PIZZA, and ice cream -- all enjoyed under a celing fan, giving me a much appreciated break from trying to keep my face from dripping right off in the relentless humidity.


You know you live in the jungle when after a week your bag of ginger is sprouting stalks right through the plastic. I hang my clothes on the line and bring them in at night for three days after a wash, but they still never get past damp - I am actually shaking fruit flies off my shirts before I put them on. The upside? Rain water is now more reliable than my local taps will ever be!



Out of every school in town, the only one to hold any kind of graduation ceremony was...the nursery school? And somehow, even though there is not a single book in the concrete school house and the headmistress's office is made of plywood, robes and mortar boards came out of nowhere for the four-years olds!
I led the class in the song we had been practicing, "This Little Light of Mine", and the other surprise of the day was that all of a sudden the teacher wanted them to sing it with tall lit candles, as they marched. Never having practiced with anything but our pointer fingers, and with synthetic robes and hairdos all around and no protection from the hot wax, the pre-schoolers were now expected to march in line, singing, and waving their candles. No one seemed very concerned about the glaring safety hazard aside from me - I blew them all out when the kids could not focus one bit, then they re-lit them once we were inside.


 My precious neighbor Rea - she was the class prefect (again, surprising amounts of formality in informal settings - the school does not have running water or a bathroom) and gave a speech!



Another example of how important appearance is here - every little girl had a new hair do for the big day, yet many of them had missed school throughout the year because their parents could not come up with the school fees. I find that outside appearance is generally a far higher priority than quality child development - shiny black shoes instead of a notebook and pencil, for example, even at the high school level.



My Health Club crew marching proudly once again during the May 20th holiday, which commemorates the British and French Cameroons joining as one (in 1972) - notably, not a word about the significance of the day was mentioned in my Anglophone town - bit of a sore topic, the whole matter. But hey, at least we got some light shed on another hush-hush issue - HIV.



After weeks of practicing and writing lyrics, the Health Club ladies' performance of HIV songs was a huge hit! The moves, the messages, it all came together and I got loads of positive feed back, which felt fantastic. In a tradition that felt bizarrely like an underage strip tease show, local leaders from the facing grand stand come down during the performance and smother the singers with money, dropping bills onto the heads, tucking them into their clothes...sometimes you want another American around just to share a "is this really happening?!" look. But hey, with $50 collected from around their feet for next year's projects, this girl's not judging.

Business as usual...almost. This is the official receipt I sent as a picture attachment to the Peace Corps so that they could reimburse my bank account, the account that has a crayon-drawn village map on file for my current address.
My lock has broken four times since moving in - sadly, cheap does not begin to describe the quality of products that are available here. Village labor is also not of the most refined quality. The lock-smith, after hurriedly welding the last lock into my iron door, realized it was ill-fit and jutted out so the door would not even close. So he brutally bashed the whole thing, lock, door, and door frame, with a sledgehammer until it was so dented and missahapen that it now slams shut...good enough? That's usually the name of the game. I realize that quality job training and notions of professionalism and customer service are luxeries not to be taken for granted.


School's out for the summer! (I keep referring to "summer", which means nothing here since our seasons don't exist, they call it "long holidays") which means lots of kids with not much to do. There are few, if any, organized extra curricular type activities for students even during the school year but especially now...which is why I can't wait to help lead a summer camp next week! Coming up - campfires, songs, and all the run-around games I loved in my own summer camp days. Still to be determined: can we recreate tie-dye and s'mores in Africa?


A much enjoyed weekend retreat to the ocean four hours away, where I found a cold current coming from this little river. When finding water is a daily stress, being immersed in unlimited amounts of H2O is a priceless form of therapy!

Tomorrow marks 9 months in country, and I have already hit 6 out of 24 at my post! Thanks for your love and please keep it up!  Remember to write strong evangelical religious messages on any packages to discourage tampering, to the tune of "THIS PACKAGE IS SOAKED IN THE BLOOD OF JESUS" - (first person brave enough to do this gets a blog post dedicated to them!)